In 1629, many decades before clockmaking was established in the Black Forest, an Augsburg nobleman by the name of Philipp Hainhofer (1578-1647) penned the first known description of a cuckoo clock. The clock belonged to Prince Elector August von Sachsen.
In a widely known handbook on music Musurgia Universalis (1650), the scholar Athanasius Kircher describes a mechanical organ with several automated figures, including a mechanical cuckoo. This book contains the first documented description -in words and pictures- of how a mechanical cuckoo works. The bird automatically opens its beak and moves both its wings and tail. Simultaneously, we hear the call of the cuckoo, created by two organ pipes, tuned to A Minor or Major Third.
In 1669 Domenico Martinelli, in his Handbook on elementary clocks Horologi Elementari (1669), suggests using the call of the cuckoo to indicate the hours. Starting at that time the mechanism of the cuckoo clock was known. Any mechanic or clockmaker, who could read Latin or Italian, knew after reading the books that it was quite doable to have the cuckoo announce the hours.
Subsequently, cuckoo clocks appeared in regions that had not been known for their clockmaking.
A few decades later, people in the Black Forest started to build cuckoo clocks. With their creative genius, cleverness and dexterity, the inhabitants of the region used the long winter months to make cuckoo clocks with richly handcarved decoration from various woods. Their farms were snowed-in, which gave the people a lot of time to create finely handcrafted cuckoo clocks of many styles with rich and varied carvings. The clocks were made in the winter and later sold by clock peddlars who journied throughout Europe with the clocks on a secure frame carried on their backs. These cuckoo clocks were works of art, and sought after lucuries that conquered the hearts of people all over the world.
It is not clear who built the first cuckoo clocks in the Black Forest, but there is unanimity that the unusual clock with the bird call very quickly conquered the Black Forest. The first Black Forest cuckoo clocks were made in the middle of the 18th century. They had hand-painted shields and wooden clockworks.
There are two main fables from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries which tell conflicting stories about the origin of the cuckoo clock:
The first is from Father Franz Steyrer, written in 1796. He describes a meeting between two clock traders from Furtwangen (Black Forest) who met a traveling Bohemian trader who sold wooden cuckoo clocks. Both the Furtwangen traders were so excited that they bought one. On bringing it home, they copied it and showed their imitation to other Black Forest clock traders. Its popularity grew in the region and more and more clockmakers started producing them.
The second story is related by another priest, Markus Fidelis Jäck, in a passage from his report "Darstellungen aus der Industrie und des Verkehrs aus dem Schwarzwald" ("Description of Industry and Commerce of the Black Forest"), 1810: "The cuckoo clock was invented (in 1730) by a clock-master from Scönwald (Black Forest). This craftsman adorned a clock with a moving bird that announced the hour with the cuckoo-call. The clock-master got the idea of how to make the cuckoo-call from the bellows of a church organ". As time went on, the second version became the more popular, and is the one generally related today. Unfortunately, neither Steyrer nor Jäck quote any sources for their claims, making them unverifiable.
On the other hand, in 1948 R. Dorer pointed out that Franz Anton Ketterer (1734 - 1806) could not have been the inventor of the cuckoo clock in 1730 because he hadn't then been born. Gerd Bender in "Die Uhrenmacher des hohen Schwarzwaldes und ihre Werke" wrote that the cuckoo clock was not native to the Black Forest. Schaaf in "Schwarzwalduhren," provides his own research which leads to the earliest cuckoos being in the "Franken-Niederbayern" area (East of Germany) in the direction of Bohemia (a region of the Czech Republic), which he notes, lends credence to the Steyrer version.
The legend that the cuckoo clock was invented by a clever Black Forest mechanic in 1730 keeps being told over and over again. But all of this is not true! The cuckoo clock is much older than clockmaking in the Black Forest. As early as 1650 the bird with the distinctive call was part of the reference book knowledge recorded in handbooks.
Although the idea of placing a cuckoo bird in a clock did not originate in the Black Forest, it is necessary to emphasize that the cuckoo clock as we know it today, comes from this region located in southwest Germany whose tradition of clockmaking started in the late seventeenth century. The Black Forest people who created the cuckoo clock industry developed it, and still come up with new designs and technical improvements which have made the cuckoo clock a valued work of art all over the world. The cuckoo clock history is linked to the Black Forest.
At the beginning of the 19th century the now traditional Black Forest clock design, the "Schilduhr" (shield clock), which had a painted flat square wooden face, behind which all the clockwork was attached. On top of the square was usually a semi-circle of highly decorated wood which contained the door for the cuckoo. There was no cabinet surrounding the clockwork in this model. This design was the most prevalent for the first half of the nineteenth century. These clocks were typically sold from door to door by "Uhrentraeger" (clock-peddlers) who would carry the dials and movements on their backs displayed on huge backpacks.
In the middle of the nineteenth century, there were also cuckoo mechanisms combined with the "Rahmenuhr" (framed-clock). As the name suggests, this clock consisted of a picture frame, usually with a typical Black Forest scene painted on a wooden background or a lithograph. The cuckoo was usually included in the scene, and would pop out in 3D, as usual, to announce the hour.
In 1850, the first director of the grandducal clockmaker school at Furtwangen Robert Gerwig, launched a public competition to submit designs for modern clockcases, which would allow homemade products to attain a professional appearance. Friedrich Eisenlohr, who as an architect had been responsible for creating the buildings along the then new and first railroad line, submitted the most far-reaching design. Eisenlohr enhanced the facade of a standard railroad-guard’s residence, as he had built many of them, with a clock dial. This wall clock became the prototype of today’s popular Souvenir cuckoo clocks.
From 1854 the "Bahnhäusle" (Railway-house) clock was equipped with cuckoo mechanisms. By 1860, the Bahnhäusle style had started to develop away from its original, “severe” graphic form, and evolve between other designs, toward the well-known case with three-dimensional woodcarvings, like the "Jagdstäck" ("hunt piece", design created in Furtwangen in 1861), a cuckoo clock with carved oak foliage and hunting motives, such as trophy animals, guns and powder pouches. In 1862 the reputed clockmaker, Johann Baptist Beha, started to enhance his richly decorated Bahnhäusle clocks with hands carved from bone, and weights cast in the shape of pine cones. Even today this combination of elements is characteristic for cuckoo clocks, although the hands are usually made of wood. Only ten years after its invention by Friedrich Eisenlohr, all variations of the house-theme had reached maturity.
The cuckoo clock became successful and world famous after Friedrich Eisenlohr contributed the Bahnhäusle design to the 1850 competition at the Furtwangen Clock Maker School.
The "Chalet" style originated at the end of nineteenth century. There are currently three different basic styles: Black Forest chalet, Swiss chalet (with two types the "Brienz" and the "Emmenthal") and finally the Bavarian chalet. In this sort of cuckoo clocks is common the use of a music box, dancing figurines and other automatisms. Some "traditional" clocks feature a music box and dancing figurines as well.
The basic cuckoo clock of today is the railway-house (Bahnhäusle) form, still with its rich ornamentation, and these are known under the name of "traditional"; which display carved leaves, birds, deer heads (like the Jagdstück design), other animals, etc. The richly decorated BahnhÃäsle clocks have become a symbol of the Black Forest that is instantly understood anywhere in the world.
The center of production continues to be the Black Forest region of Germany, in the area of Triberg im Schwarzwald and Neustadt, where there are several dozen firms making the whole clock or parts of it. The cuckoo clock is often wrongly associated with Switzerland, as in the movie The Third Man produced in the United States. This error is probably due to a story by Mark Twain in which the hero depicts the Swiss town of Lucerne as the home of cuckoo clocks.
